(some of) The other repies to the above comment are well worth reading.
I can only add that it isn't necessary to have patents to have research as the poster asserts. Imagine having medicines made for the public good funded by the public purse.
Drugs companies aren't in the business of making ill people healthy. They are in the business of making as much money as possible, which given their expertise means making addictive drugs that make rich people happy.
The USA is well documented as having a large prison population (highest percentage of population in prison, and highest fraction of incaraceration). See for example this article I just found using Google.
You can't vote in prison. That means you can't vote for the man who wants to strike out DMCA or remove the RIAA's powers.
You miss the point. A company and its directors can be prosecuted in law (by the shareholders) for not maximising shareholder profit. It doesn't matter if the articles say the company should promote open source software or green energy or whatever. If the directors do something that clearly doesn't maximise shareholder profit then the shareholders will prosecute and get a court order to reverse the decision.
And of course this situation sucks.
Re:Finally, ABI stabilization. Now about optimizat
on
GCC 3.2 Released
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· Score: 1
The new C standard contains very strict rules about pointers, e.g. writing into an array with a "double *" pointer, and reading back with a "long *" pointer is now undefined.
That's "new" as in 1989 when ANSI adopted the standard for C. Yes folks, these aliasing rules have been around for 13 years now.
Why is it that most C programmers don't know about them? I don't know. But producing compilers that default to letting broken code get away with it can't help the situation.
The bill is sufficiently vaguely worded that it covers changing the unique identifier of any wireless communications device. Of course, "wireless communications device" isn't defined in the bill, but it might cover wireless ethernet cards in a laptop for example. And using ipconfig to change the MAC address would be an offence. Possibly, owning a copy of ipconfig or supplying it could be an offence. I can think of several reasonable uses of changing a card's MAC address.
Also, I just checked parliament's website and this isn't a bill, it has been passed as an act! Soon to become law no doubt.
I've said this before but I'll say it again. Every time a book, CD, DVD, Video is borrowed from a public library the library pays a government sponsored organization (in the UK and US, other countries are similar) a small amount. At the end of the year, the big pot is divided up amongst signed up artists/writers/directors according to how popular they are (or some other method). Basically, the RIAA cannot whinge about libraries; they already get their cut.
Re:Public Domain is too free for most creative wor
on
What Is Public Domain?
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· Score: 1
The things you want (credit for what you have created, protection from derogation) are called Moral Rights in most jurisdictions. For example, an author has the moral right to be known as the author of the works she wrote. This is different from copyright (which makes copying a protected work an offence). Often the moral rights last forever, which copyright certainly does not. Some jurisdictions (EG Europe) have a moral right that allows authors to prevent their work being used in a manner that is derogatory to the author (this would certainly cover your case of a song being used to promote KKK).
Tough noogies if WB doesn't get money for each rental. If their content isn't worth owning, that's their fault. Don't punish the consumers for it.
In fact most national copyright laws transcribe the Berne Convention right of Rental Right. The copyright owner of a work gets a cut every time a dvd or video is rented in a video store and every time a book is loaned out in a library.
Also, buying a DVD does not grant you ownership of the content, the copyright holder still has that.
IIRC the following paper details it being done on DEC Firefly processors:
Andrew W. Appel, John R. Ellis, and Kai Li. Real-time concurrent garbage collection on stock multiprocessors. In Proceedings of the 1988 SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 11--20, Atlanta, Georgia, June 1988. ACM Press.
AT&T's Globeview 2000 (an ATM phone switch I think, telecoms is not my speciality) uses Harlequin's (presumably now xanalys) Real Time Lisp (a variant on their ordinary Lisp). It certainly garbage collects in real time meaning their is an upper bound on the length of a pause due to GC and a guarantee of maximum CPU overhead due to GC.
Those resources might be valuable, but so is the ability to add a new voicemail service to your phone switch without dropping existing calls (which rebooting the switch would do).
Let's say A is giving away source code.
B takes the source code and compiles it. B gives the compiled version to C, without giving B the source code.
Has C been deprived of any freedom that B had? No, because C could get the source code from A, just as B did. Freedom has not been decreased by the act of B.
You are right to be skeptical but I don't think that soldiers fleeing a besieged city that is about to be overrun worry about whether they should go back for the wristwatch they left by the bed.
I use ash, because it is/bin/sh on FreeBSD which is what I use mostly. I believe it is fairly conservative (that is, doesn't implement much more than a minimal bourne shell). I know the POSIX spec' fairly well. I never have any problems writing incompatible scripts (by, for example, accidentally using features that some other shell doesn't implement). I very occasionally find myself thinking that the bash/POSIX ksh syntax for arithmetic expressions would be nice (usually around the same time that I think I ought to rewrite the script in awk/python/c).
Of course, because I mostly only use FreeBSD I don't get to test my scripts on other shells very often... (HP-UX, OSF, and Ultrix used to be good platforms for finding quirky shells).
The shell I use most often is rc (from plan 9), but I don't do "real" programming in that because no other system has it installed (certainly not by default). Having a fairly even mixture of programming sh and programming rc is a good way to mess up your mind.
Yes, but that's why they're teaching IT skills. If a web developer doesn't turn up on time (!) or doesn't call in sick, that's Standard Operating Procedure. Who would even blink an eye?
Seems like a great idea to me.
Re:Retro gaming is popular for a good reason...
on
Vanishing Game Genres
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· Score: 1
... gameplay.
And this is why I think handhelds have it.
There's only so much budget you can waste doing fancy artwork and hours of music on a Game boy colour (though Disney are trying their best). So in the end the good people spend their money on gameplay.
Aside from Perfect Dark the games I play most are Super Bomberman (a 1992 release on the SNES) and Zelda: Link's Awakening (a 1993? release on the Game boy).
From what I have seen of Bugdom (someone next door plays it a bit) it is a collecting and exploring game. A cynic would say it is like Super Mario Bros, where you have to collect coins, without the platforms.
They don't mention puzzle, platform, or racing. Do they think those genres as alive and kicking on the PC? PC puzzle says tetris or minesweeper to me. Very very old.
The last good PC platformer was Prince of Persia.
I think they mean to say that all PC gaming is getting jaded - not just the in the genres they mention.
The real innovation is happening in the handheld market. Big games like Pokemon, and little ones like Mr Driller.
Re:Linux rehashs 70s era OS.. wow, special.
on
A Praise To Unix
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· Score: 1
> Linux so far is a step sideways at best.
This is unfair. Is is true, technologically linux introduced few (none?) new OS features. But that's not the point. What it did was raise the base platform. Suddenly any hacker with a few dollars good get a PC with a good quality OS with commercial features. A generation of Amiga hackers in Copper-burnout-mode was replaced with a generation of UNIX hackers learning respectable and marketable skills like C/C++, internetworking, sysadmin.
Slashdot Mirror
(some of) The other repies to the above comment are well worth reading.
I can only add that it isn't necessary to have patents to have research as the poster asserts. Imagine having medicines made for the public good funded by the public purse.
Drugs companies aren't in the business of making ill people healthy. They are in the business of making as much money as possible, which given their expertise means making addictive drugs that make rich people happy.
Ethical issues aside, surely it is not that surprising that someone at Microsoft uses a Mac? After all don't Microsoft sell software for the Mac?
Also I expect all the creative people, like the guys producing box art, all uses Macs too.
A new C++ this decade. :-).
I'm willing to bet that x >= 0xA for this C++0x.
The USA is well documented as having a large prison population (highest percentage of population in prison, and highest fraction of incaraceration). See for example this article I just found using Google.
You can't vote in prison. That means you can't vote for the man who wants to strike out DMCA or remove the RIAA's powers.
You miss the point. A company and its directors can be prosecuted in law (by the shareholders) for not maximising shareholder profit. It doesn't matter if the articles say the company should promote open source software or green energy or whatever. If the directors do something that clearly doesn't maximise shareholder profit then the shareholders will prosecute and get a court order to reverse the decision.
And of course this situation sucks.
The new C standard contains very strict rules about pointers, e.g. writing into an array with a "double *" pointer, and reading back with a "long *" pointer is now undefined.
That's "new" as in 1989 when ANSI adopted the standard for C. Yes folks, these aliasing rules have been around for 13 years now.
Why is it that most C programmers don't know about them? I don't know. But producing compilers that default to letting broken code get away with it can't help the situation.
I did read the it. Act and Notes. Notes are not law. Acts are.
The bill is sufficiently vaguely worded that it covers changing the unique identifier of any wireless communications device. Of course, "wireless communications device" isn't defined in the bill, but it might cover wireless ethernet cards in a laptop for example. And using ipconfig to change the MAC address would be an offence. Possibly, owning a copy of ipconfig or supplying it could be an offence. I can think of several reasonable uses of changing a card's MAC address.
Also, I just checked parliament's website and this isn't a bill, it has been passed as an act! Soon to become law no doubt.
I've said this before but I'll say it again. Every time a book, CD, DVD, Video is borrowed from a public library the library pays a government sponsored organization (in the UK and US, other countries are similar) a small amount. At the end of the year, the big pot is divided up amongst signed up artists/writers/directors according to how popular they are (or some other method). Basically, the RIAA cannot whinge about libraries; they already get their cut.
The things you want (credit for what you have created, protection from derogation) are called Moral Rights in most jurisdictions. For example, an author has the moral right to be known as the author of the works she wrote. This is different from copyright (which makes copying a protected work an offence). Often the moral rights last forever, which copyright certainly does not. Some jurisdictions (EG Europe) have a moral right that allows authors to prevent their work being used in a manner that is derogatory to the author (this would certainly cover your case of a song being used to promote KKK).
IANAL. Obviously.
Tough noogies if WB doesn't get money for each rental. If their content isn't worth owning, that's their fault. Don't punish the consumers for it.
In fact most national copyright laws transcribe the Berne Convention right of Rental Right. The copyright owner of a work gets a cut every time a dvd or video is rented in a video store and every time a book is loaned out in a library.
Also, buying a DVD does not grant you ownership of the content, the copyright holder still has that.
It is certainly _a_ way. More on GC? See The Memory Management Reference.
IIRC the following paper details it being done on DEC Firefly processors:
Andrew W. Appel, John R. Ellis, and Kai Li. Real-time concurrent garbage collection on stock multiprocessors. In Proceedings of the 1988 SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 11--20, Atlanta, Georgia, June 1988. ACM Press.
AT&T's Globeview 2000 (an ATM phone switch I think, telecoms is not my speciality) uses Harlequin's (presumably now xanalys) Real Time Lisp (a variant on their ordinary Lisp). It certainly garbage collects in real time meaning their is an upper bound on the length of a pause due to GC and a guarantee of maximum CPU overhead due to GC.
Those resources might be valuable, but so is the ability to add a new voicemail service to your phone switch without dropping existing calls (which rebooting the switch would do).
Here's a press release with some marketing details
Solar power won't help in a storm will it?
Let's say A is giving away source code.
B takes the source code and compiles it. B gives the compiled version to C, without giving B the source code.
Has C been deprived of any freedom that B had? No, because C could get the source code from A, just as B did. Freedom has not been decreased by the act of B.
You are right to be skeptical but I don't think that soldiers fleeing a besieged city that is about to be overrun worry about whether they should go back for the wristwatch they left by the bed.
I use ash, because it is /bin/sh on FreeBSD which is what I use mostly. I believe it is fairly conservative (that is, doesn't implement much more than a minimal bourne shell). I know the POSIX spec' fairly well. I never have any problems writing incompatible scripts (by, for example, accidentally using features that some other shell doesn't implement). I very occasionally find myself thinking that the bash/POSIX ksh syntax for arithmetic expressions would be nice (usually around the same time that I think I ought to rewrite the script in awk/python/c).
Of course, because I mostly only use FreeBSD I don't get to test my scripts on other shells very often... (HP-UX, OSF, and Ultrix used to be good platforms for finding quirky shells).
The shell I use most often is rc (from plan 9), but I don't do "real" programming in that because no other system has it installed (certainly not by default). Having a fairly even mixture of programming sh and programming rc is a good way to mess up your mind.
This comment has been scanned for viruses.
Yes, but that's why they're teaching IT skills. If a web developer doesn't turn up on time (!) or doesn't call in sick, that's Standard Operating Procedure. Who would even blink an eye?
Seems like a great idea to me.
And this is why I think handhelds have it.
There's only so much budget you can waste doing fancy artwork and hours of music on a Game boy colour (though Disney are trying their best). So in the end the good people spend their money on gameplay.
Aside from Perfect Dark the games I play most are Super Bomberman (a 1992 release on the SNES) and Zelda: Link's Awakening (a 1993? release on the Game boy).
From what I have seen of Bugdom (someone next door plays it a bit) it is a collecting and exploring game. A cynic would say it is like Super Mario Bros, where you have to collect coins, without the platforms.
The last good PC platformer was Prince of Persia.
I think they mean to say that all PC gaming is getting jaded - not just the in the genres they mention.
The real innovation is happening in the handheld market. Big games like Pokemon, and little ones like Mr Driller.
> Linux so far is a step sideways at best. This is unfair. Is is true, technologically linux introduced few (none?) new OS features. But that's not the point. What it did was raise the base platform. Suddenly any hacker with a few dollars good get a PC with a good quality OS with commercial features. A generation of Amiga hackers in Copper-burnout-mode was replaced with a generation of UNIX hackers learning respectable and marketable skills like C/C++, internetworking, sysadmin.